It's Raining Tweets: Severe Weather Reports Come to Twitter

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Don't retire your weather radio just yet — but a new way to get
weather reports is taking social media by storm.

From YouTube videos of tornadoes to Facebook status updates about
the rain, people are chatty about the weather on social networks.
The National Weather Service (NWS) wants to harness these amateur
reports — so in an experimental project that's nearly a year old,
the NWS has been scanning tweets to collect storm reports.

The idea for the project bubbled up over a year ago when Tim
Brice, a NWS meteorologist in El Paso, Texas, noticed that people
were frequently using the popular social network Twitter to send
messages (known on Twitter as tweets) about the weather.

"I thought, 'you know, everyone likes to tweet about the weather,
it would be nice if we could harness that in some way,'" Brice
told OurAmazingPlanet.

Traditionally storm reports were only accepted from the roughly
100,000 trained storm reporters around the country. But there's
an army of Twitter users that could help the NWS get storm
reports even faster.

The trick is to filter the storm tweets by location. If a person
in Arizona searches Twitter for only the words "flood" or "hail,"
they might get reports from Bangladesh rather than reports near
their house.

The great thing about Twitter, Brice said, is that users with
smartphones can add their location to tweets through so-called
geotagging. The NWS can then pin each tweet to a point on a map,
which helps meteorologists hone in on the severe weather.

Yet tweets are often frivolous, so in order to filter out tweets
about a sunny afternoon from tweets about funnel clouds, the NWS
is using a device well-known to tweeters — the hashtag. Simply
add "#wxreport" to a tweet, along with a few other basics, such
as the kind of weather and the time, and someone at the NWS will
see the tweet (Example: #wxreport Hail 3/4 inch in diameter at
4:25 p.m.).

Examples of location can include anything from latitude and
longitude to a ZIP code. To tweet about statewide severe weather,
use the two-letter state abbreviation followed by "wx" (Example:
for severe weather in Alabama, use #ALwx).

Anyone can view the reports by searching for #wxreport on
Twitter. The severe weather tweets are also plotted
on a map that constantly reloads to make it easier for
meteorologists to analyze the latest information.

During the experimental period, all tweets are being carefully
monitored to make sure they are accurate and up-to-date.